Scenes 1: The Funeral Gate.
It is a quarter of black stone between three dead kingdoms, and in standing at the lowest point of the Black Pass, Shen Wuye has half a day to go, and as he stands there, the first wave arrives.
He does counts them by sound before he notices them, not the sound of hoofs, since the Corpse Banner Clan ties the feet of their horses with funeral silk to help them approach silently, but rather the rustle of banners. Twenty of the riders, whose flags are made of burial cloth and the carcass of the foe, the black and crimson stuff whistles in the spray of the ash wind like the feathers of dead birds.
Wuye sticks the Nail Sword point down on the ground next to him. The sword is cruel, unlike a coffin nail, embossed with sealing markings, still faintly visible. He leaves it there. Not yet.
It is behind him that the scattering of plague refugee who have dogged him huddle. They are coughing, dead, starving already, everything, except, so to speak, the other. He does not even look at them. Looking at them will compel him to reflect upon why he has been sent here, and reflecting upon why he has been sent here is to remember the faces he had failed to save, and he will remember the faces he will remember theirs
The horsemen emerge out of the mist of ash. Twenty lances lowered. Twenty banners raised. The faces that are stitched on the cloth appear to move as they are riding, their mouths opening and closing and screaming but saying nothing.
Wuye attracts the sword he has broken which is covered in funeral cloth. The cloth is like a handkerchief on a burial. Singing to its death is the blade thin chanting of a choir.
He does something and does not anticipate it.
Vein Ignition partial.
His neck has black veins creeping up fainting on the stump of his left arm, crossing over his jaw, and his cheek and the end of his eye. The world slows. This ash of the sky descending turns itself into a curtain of gray beads suspended with no motion. The tip of his lance is three feet short of his chest, and the rider can see the wood grain, the rust that is peeling off the point of iron, how the eyes of the rider have not yet come into focussing on the fact that he is moving.
He weaves. The lance penetrates the area that his chest filled a beat earlier. His Finger Armor Claws four razors that protrude out of his knuckles rip his rider open ear to ear. The blood of the man is black as old corruption, sprays on the face of Wuye and is coppery and rotten.
He doesn't stop. The shattered sword is raised, and on the length of the blade he cuts horse and man in two impalements. The smearing cuts sound louder as it goes, shaking his arm, his chest, the demon in his stump, that throbs with hunger which he does not feed.
The other horseman attempts to spin. His spine is spotted by the claws of Wuye. The latter lengthens his lance belatedly. the shattered sword lays hold on his arm at the shoulder, and turns, and grasps the legs of his horse. together the man and the beast crash carcass, and Wuye is already down them, stitching death into all the holes.
What the mind attempts to forget is kept inside his body. The Clan of the Widows taught him to move so, and move economically, very precise, with each slay being a stitch in a seam. The Funeral Monastery taught him how to kill in this way exorcist brute, trying to make the flesh rotten, unable to revive again. Widow and Monk he is not. He lies between something and something. It is something which should not be there.
And the final horseman attempts to flee. The threads of Wuye, whose fingertips have filiest of silk-veins, snare the ankle of the man, and dart around, grabbing. The rider falls. The sword that is broken recovers.
Silence.
Twenty bodies. Twenty horses. Blood all pooling on the black rock, dashing in the ashen rain. At its middle is Wuye, heaving, his chest, and dripping on his right hand and his left sleeve tacked against his ribs with no stuff in it. It has already become clear that the black veins are already drawing away him from his jaw line, up and down his neck and back to the stump where the demon is slumbering. Hungry. Waiting.
He resorts to the refugees. Not only are they gazing at him like people gaze at something that may assist them or may consume them. He is not putting the blame on them.
He says get the bodies burning before night. The hoarseness of his voice is battered by the veil ignition heat in his throat. "They'll rise otherwise."
A woman is initiating onwards. A man. They are accustomed to taking orders with the killers. That is the way they have managed to survive this.
There is only one of them that does not move.
A boy. Thirteen, or maybe younger that is hard to guess on the plague popular. He is little, puny, and his skin is too tight and over the bones, which is not expected to see. He has black and matted hair, which flops over the eyes of storm cloud colour. His coat is oversized, stitched up at the left arm, which sticks to his chest empty, an echo, a mirror, a parody of what Wuye himself lost, his arm.
He does not turn his head away towards the blood.
Scene 2: The Boy That Speaks Truth.
And they address him as Little Crow. Wuye does not understand whether it is his name that he adopted or it is a name that the refugees have given him. He doesn't ask. Names are dangerous. Names refer to the fact that one may have to remember a person even after death.
The kid does not assist in the corpses. He is too young, too ill, coughs black phlegm where the smoke of the funerary fires gets thick. But he travels over the dead, his naked feet falling noiselessly on the rock, his stolen coat of clothes trailing in the ash. He pauses in between bodies. Looks at the face. Then pulls out a piece of charcoal in his pocket, and writes something up on the pass wall.
Wuye observes him along the snatching. The Nail Sword has returned in his hand with the broken sword tied on his back. He ought to be taking his rest. The factual ignition has made him shake and his blood is too hot, his thinking too quick. But the wind is shifting, and the wind has odours, and the odour which comes out of the pass entrance is not right.
When the boy gets near him, he asks him what he is writing.
Little Crow lofts his eyes. His gaze is undisturbed. The survivors of the plague have no scruples.
It is their names. They are their names, should I know. He is supporting the charcoal. The ones I do not, I write someone and the date. someone should remember they were people first before they were meat.
Wuye doesn't answer. He is staring at the entrance door. The dust is settling in the form of bigger and bigger flakes of gray ash, upon his shoulders, on his pinned sleeve, upon the hilt of the Nail Sword.
"What's coming?" Little Crow asks. His voice is a soft, savage, childlike voice.
Something that does not forget anything.
The boy is gazing at him. His countenance is as old as it were too young, the plague mutilations that draw the corners of his lip, the lines beneath the eyes too far. However, there is fear in his expression but not only fear. Wuye goes a long time before it occurs to him.
Recognition.
And are you going to run? Little Crow asks.
"I don't run."
What I did not ask was that. There is no voice change of the boy. I said, I wondered whether you are going to run, you look like you want to run.
Wuye looks at him. Really looks. He looks at the coat his coat, it is his coat, he understands, though it is a old one, the left sleeve thought to be pinned as he pins his. He observes the lacerations to the wrists of the boy, the manner in which his fingers shake to grasp the charcoal, the manner in which he stands with his burden on his back foot that he wants to run away.
He observes a boy who has understood to read the faces of employees of murder. Who has lived through knowing how to make his legs run.
"No," Wuye says. I'm going to stand there until there is not anything to stand upon.
He anticipates that the boy would run away. They never fail to do so, when they get to hear the truth. Nothing heroic can be seen in being on a mountain pass with one hand and the other half of a body which is half eaten by some demon. Waiting till you die and that is no big thing. The smart ones run.
Little Crow nods. As though the right answer to that is yes.
Then I behind you I will be. Towards the wall, he looks and discovers a blank space between two names and begins to write. Someone must have to see that you do not forget why.
Scene 3: The Arrival of the Pale Horse.
A shift of wind takes place at dusk.
It is first the sense of a change of pressure, the knowing of a storm in the bones as Wuye feels it. The ash rain stops. The air is chilled never the chilledness of the mountains, but of something that is not and ought not to be pushing on the flesh of the world.
Then there is the smell. Old blood. Rusted armor. Something buried, it should not have risen.
Far behind him is Little Crow. Wuye is able to hear the breathing of the boy, too rapid, too shallow. He does not say to him to run. Unless the boy should run before this moment, he will not. Hard nosedness such as this is not the result of courage. It is a result of having nothing left to run to.
This is presented at the entrance of the pass as a wound.
The cavalry of the Pale Horse. None of the horse riders the horse riders are the horses, which was the case with the armor ghosts who are also bred together with their mounts so that their lances extend like the shadows, and their faces are blank helmets with nothing within them. They travel silently, with no trace of their foot track, no banners flow, they passes them in the air, where wind cares not to touch them.
A hundred of them. Two hundred. Others coming around back behind, coalesced, it seemed, out of the ash mist like the dead came together and held an endlessly prolonged muster.
The Nail Sword hilt is trapped in the hand of Wuye. the blade is singing; not the sweet, shrill cry of the broken sword, but the creaking, wailing lament of a coffin, the gods made with nails.
And at its end, a character which alters the song.
General Pale Horse is riding a stallion who is blind with empty sockets as his eyes. Wuye is aware of the story. They were gouged out by the hands of their master, the general himself, so the horse could never see what it is really like to serve duty. The horse is colored bone, and its veins are seen under the skin much like the blue rivers on a map of some dead thing already.
The armor of the general is made of rust black old relic plate, welded and glued, and developed into his flesh by a century and a hundred years. His helm is a death mask, the face plate of it is smooth and blank, save that where his eyes ought to have been, there are narrow slits made. The seams leak black ash which flies upwards defying the wind. His spear is ten feet of black iron and burial lacquer, the part made in the shape of a coffin lid, and up to which the haft is encircled with chains, upon which he rattles without any exertion.
The air behind him is shimmering. The Visage of the Pale Saint his Ghostfaced Aura is coming up like a second sunset. His size was doubled by a gigantic armored phantom, which stood erect in the middle of the room, the helmet hung, and the chains would stream out of the neck like tears flowing with a man inside. It gazes at Wuye with non existent eyes.
The aura of Wuye responds to him without his consent.
Thousand Hand Flesh Saint appears behind him: a halo of disemboweled, sewed, pulled at flesh, of arms and hands of prayer. The arms belong to him somehow and not to him. The faces embroidered on the palms are either screaming or quiet. The fingers are like needles, needling air, needling shadow, needling the hole between him and the cavalry into something which may hold.
The Pale Horse lifts his scalpel.
Wuye gets a glimpse of the face of the general, not the death mask, but the face underneath. A man that murdered his wife, his army, his horse, because it was his duty. A man who has lost human status many years ago that he does not know what it was like.
The spear is directed towards Wuye.
The cavalry charges.
Wuye pulls up the Nail Sword. The pierced sword is already tuning up his back. His veins are suffering, the devil in his stump throbbing, hungry, now now, now use me now
And in his rear, a childish voice, monotonous:
Well I am here, Master Wuye.
The troop of cavalry is approaching. A hundred ghosts. Two hundred. More.
He doesn't run.